Go! Go! Break Steady Review

The best (only?) break-dancing puzzler money can buy.

Go! Go! Break Steady is the kind of game that makes you ponder how a developer came up with such an odd concept -- though (thankfully) it never prompts the cynical follow-up, "Why did they think of that?" The game owes an undeniable debt to Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, which pioneered the "puzzle game plus disparate genre" concept last year by blending role-playing elements with an addicting take on the Bejeweled formula. Break Steady instead opts to blend its match-three puzzle action with a button-pressing rhythm game, creating an odd pairing that actually warrants the exclamation marks in its title.

Click the image above to check out all Go! Go! Breaksteady screens.

The rhythm and puzzle elements hardly constitute a hybrid; rather, the alternately played parts complement each other. After tapping a handful of buttons to the beat of a mostly instrumental hip-hop track, you'll have either one or three colored icons (depending on your beat-matching prowess) to fire off at the "Beatniks" assembled in a loop around your character. Matching three like icons removes that set from the loop; as in similar puzzlers like Zuma and Magnetica, the goal is to eliminate all the icons from the screen. Later stages in the 30-round All City Tournament add in D-pad/trigger/shoulder-button presses, more complex rhythm patterns, and layered Beatnik loops, creating a tense, frantic puzzler that's challenging (but not overwhelmingly so) even on the easy difficulty level. Online two-player Endurance battles are particularly enticing, though the co-op mode (in which you swap turns working the puzzle) feels like a chore if you match up with a lesser-skilled partner.

Even with the hip-hop soundtrack, the break-dancing theme probably could've been swapped for just about anything -- waffles, firefighters, a Toyota Yaris promotion, perhaps -- but I didn't find it especially overbearing or offensively phony, and the team at Little Boy Games did quite a bit with some pretty simple assets. The high-resolution hand-drawn dancers have few animations, but they still sparkle on the screen alongside heaps of flashing symbols and icons in the periphery. Go! Go! Break Steady is an unexpected visual delight (especially for HDTV owners) -- and it makes an already strong multigenre affair even better.